On Wed, 1 Oct 2008, Florin Iucha wrote: > If you install Ubuntu/Debian AMD64, then all you get is 64-bit compiled > binaries. If you want to run 32-bit applications, you need to install > the ia32-libs package. > > Fedora AMD64 by default installs a large number of 32-bit libraries, so > you can run your old binaries without too much trouble. That's a big help, thanks! I thought the 32-bit apps could run on the 64-bit OS but I didn't know about the library issue. If I were using apt-get, would it notify me if the app I was downloading was a 32-bit version? >> I'll also have to make sure that Oracle will run on that system before >> I buy it (I think I mentioned before that I'm stuck in Oracle world for >> now but may go to PostgreSQL someday). > > Oracle has a 64-bit versions for most of the supported platforms, > including Linux. With Oracle (and most proprietary packages) it might > be easier to use Centos/OpenSuse since the instructions will probably be > tailored to RedHat and Suse. Right -- I have seen info about their connection to RHEL. I'll be doing some more analysis to figure out what distro will be best for me. I've been using RHEL for years and Ubuntu for a few months and Ubuntu seems to be a lot easier for me. I like apt-get, for one. RHEL software is often way out of date. Regarding basic stability of the system: I wonder if there are any differences among the distros. They may have the same kernel and most of the same libraries, so what are the important differences? What differences would affect functioning of Oracle or the Oracle installation process? Do the newest versions of these distros conform to Linux Standard Base (LSB)? If so, doesn't that make them much more alike than they used to be? Mike